


Distant

by cruisedirector



Category: Smallville
Genre: Community: contrelamontre, Drama, Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-11-23
Updated: 2005-11-23
Packaged: 2017-10-03 15:40:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruisedirector/pseuds/cruisedirector
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On opposite sides of the city or the world, neither Clark nor Lex can sleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Distant

**Author's Note:**

  * For [karelian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/karelian/gifts).



> For the the contrelamontre late night-early morning challenge. Remixed from my own story in another fandom.

Clark never knows when his cell phone will ring -- what unpredictable moment when he's conversing at the Daily Planet or urgently shedding his clothes in a phone booth. So he never turns it off, not even in the middle of the night, when it's unlikely to ring anyway, for if Lex isn't traveling to a political event or staying up to work out a critical deal, he's most likely asleep, his bed occupied by a woman whose name he will not remember the next week.

Whenever Lex calls, Clark puts off Perry White's demands. He tells Lois he needs five more minutes, hides from Jimmy in the nearest closet, sneaks out to the barn at his parents', sits in his car at the roadside long enough to attract patrol cars.

They talk while Lex is stopping to pick up wine for dinner, while he's thumbing through comic books in the best antiquarian store in Metropolis...even while Clark is watching football, giving Lex a running commentary on a game Lex wouldn't follow if they were there together, sitting side by side. Football doesn't matter to either of them but Lex thinks Clark still follows the sport he briefly played, and Clark thinks maybe Lex calls him during games because he expects him to be home. Because of that, Clark nearly always is. They talk when Lex is on the far side of the world, when Clark's midday is Lex's midnight, and Lex is most likely to call at some absurdly early hour of a sleepless Metropolis morning.

"What time is it where you are?" Clark asks one afternoon while he's sitting at an outdoor table waiting for Lois, who has ordered him to wait while she pins down a source. The sun is shining brightly, golden rays flickering on the glass tabletops like wheat blowing in the breeze; it had made him think of Smallville, and of Lex, before the phone rang as if on cue. "Are you sitting up all night again?" he guesses.

"I haven't slept right since I landed in Tokyo," Lex replies through the inevitable static. "You should have taken some days off and come with me. Did you know that there's a red tower here based on the Eiffel Tower, but taller?" Clark's not sure whether he's sorry to have missed it, though he deeply misses being with Lex, now a disconnected voice instead of warm presence at his side. Because despite the frequent phone calls, Clark sometimes wakes alone at four in the morning with a gnawing feeling of unease, as though he's misplaced something. He thinks about calling Lex then, but Lex is usually working, locked away with scientists or government agents or corporate lackeys, inaccessible to insomniacs with phones even if they have powers beyond those of ordinary men.

When Clark and Lex are actually together, things aren't so comfortable. Lex is always suspicious that Clark is trying to get an angle for a profile, or at least to help Lois get one, when the head of Luthercorp places such a high premium on his elusiveness. Besides, he owns shares in the _Daily Planet_. And even if he knew Lex would be there for him, Clark thinks it wouldn't be a good idea to call. Lex often claims to be crunching numbers or mapping out strategies when he's talking to Clark in the middle of the night, but Clark wonders sometimes whether Lex isn't really slumped on a sofa like himself, flipping through photos of the two of them when they were younger and things seemed so much simpler.

He doesn't ask. Instead he tries to keep the conversations cheerful, to stick to happy subjects: work and sports and music and cars and, every once in awhile, an embarrassed demurral about his love life, a refusal to press the real reasons why he tags after Lois who keeps putting him off rather than looking for a convenient wife as Lex has done. Clark wants Lex to keep calling. "No Daylight Savings where you are?" he jokes when the phone sings him awake from his restless sleep in the living room, and Lex's laugh fills his ear, warmer than the blanket thrown haphazardly over his unnaturally strong feet.

It's easy to blame late-night agitation on crazy work schedules and having to fly off at a moment's notice to save everyone else who needs saving. And it's easy enough for them to distract one another from their mutual restlessness, sharing the superficial details of their lives...the things they would take for granted if they lived as close as they once did, and made time to see one another, and ended up sitting face to face when exhaustion lowered their defenses enough to talk about the things that matter.

Clark never asks aloud whether Lex ever imagines, as he does, that they would both sleep better side by side, in some common time zone.

 


End file.
